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Reading now a wonderful historical book “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman and can’t stop wondering – does the history really teach anybody anything, or is the humanity doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again?

One of the challenges of being a writer is what happens when you finish your new work and finally let it out into the wild. It probably is similar to the moment, when a child grows up and leaves the parent’s house – an “empty nest” syndrome, or maybe a bit like postpartum depression. First, you feel happy and proud, some sense of achievement. Then, comes the anxiety – how will the big world accept your child, now that you can’t help? And then you realize that you gave your child a part of your soul, and now this place is uncomfortably void and will take time to heal. And then you start thinking – do I want to have another baby? Am I ready for it? Is it worth it?

For those interested in the background of my latest work “No Sugar”, diabetes (both type one and type two) is currently number 4 killer in the world, according to the latest statistics. Higher than this are only cardio, cancer, and respiratory diseases. While type two is usually associated with overweight and lifestyle, type one hits young people for an unknown reason, which I find especially tragic.

Just finished yesterday my new novella, or, rather, novelette, because it is rather short – “No Sugar”. It could have been a relatively usual romantic story, except for one twist – the girl has type one diabetes since young, and this had affected her life and choices a lot. Enjoy!

I was recently researching the environment into which “Wish” would fit. The obvious choice seemed to be different anti-war resources, and I was surprised how much, apparently, the whole anti-war movement is in decline these days. Nobody is anti-war any more, but there are plenty of supporters of wars for all kinds of different “good causes”. Indeed, one of the biggest problems of the modern world is that there are way too many people around who sincerely believe that they can solve their problems, whatever they are, by killing or hurting others.

Every human person experience in his or her life the moments of extreme happiness, which will never return, or the moments of extreme pain or sadness. Some of these moments form a bond with particular places. As you grow, the map of your world is more and more peppered with such no-go zones, which are too painful to visit. I’ve just extended the collection of mine by a few. Maybe it will become a part of the next story, to help myself to get over it.

For a long time, I was trying to find a place for a productive writing holiday. I tried traveling to many different places I like, but nothing really worked, everywhere it was even more difficult than at home. I was thinking hard about what might be the problem, but didn’t find any good ideas – until I had an eureka moment recently. I need a moderately boring place, not the favorite place! A place, which still provides some minimal level of stimuli, and convenience, like eatable food and network access – but nothing else, so that the most interesting thing to do there would be to dive deeper in my stories.
And I’ve found such a place not too far away, and it worked like charm. In just two days, I was able to make more progress with my next story, than in a few months before that. The story, however, got much shorter, so likely it will be yet another short story, not a novella, as I thought first – but it’s ok, who has time to read anything long these days anyway?

Published today my short story, or, rather, flash fiction, “Wish” . I was lucky with this one, as most of the story came to me in a form of a bad and disturbing dream about two men awaiting an imminent nuclear strike, with myself being one of the characters. It was so vivid that I didn’t have any problems recalling it in all details even a few days after. When I realized it doesn’t want to go away by itself, I had to make it a story – all I had to do is adding a few small details here and there, but most of the story still is as it was in the dream. I had bad dreams about the nuclear war before, but this was the most vivid yet.

Interesting to note that there are many stories describing what happens after the nuclear strike, but not so many describing what happens just before. Might be a good name for a new genre – “pre-apocalyptic”.